IconBox 2.0 Review

The first version of IconBox was released 7 years ago and it was the very first Icon Organizer for Mac OS X. It allowed users to organize their collection of icons in an iPhoto-like way. With version 2, IconBox has been completely rewritten and features a brand new interface.

IconBox provides icon lovers new and old with a great toolset that might persuade some to use it over Panic’s own Candy Bar 3. IconBox 2.0 is a full featured icon library for your Mac and it has four main different modes, I’m going to try to expain those four different modes one by one.

Mode 1: Organize

There are the same easy to use organization features like in the original version but with a couple of nice additions. The libraries are now called “Boxes” and you can drag icons from the finder into a box, create as many boxes as you like. Then you can arrange the Boxes in folders and subfolders and you can re-drag Boxes and folders to change their order.

A nice new feature in this version is “Smart Boxes” and it is a bit similar like the iTunes Smart Playlists, you create the criteria and they are being updated constantly. The search feature has been improved a lot and the speed is a lot faster now. Besides organizing, you can export icons to different formats like ICNS, png, tiff, jpeg, gif, the iContainer format and .zip package.

Mode 2: Customize

In this new version you can fully customize all sorts of icons: system icons, dock icons, application icons and even your dock in an easy to use drag-and drop way.

Mode 3: Tools

In the current release there is one tool available – XRay – but more tools will be added in future releases. The XRay tool scans your application folder and lists all of the available applications. When clicking an application, you are able to peek inside the contents of an application and filter all the stuff in there by type. (png, tiff, pdf, ins).

Mode 4: Online

The Online mode has three subcategories. The first one is “Icon-Of-The-Day”, A new icon from a particular icon designer every day, downloadable directly into IconBox 2. The second feature is “IconFinder” which implements the iconfinder.com API which allows to search all the icons on iconfinder.com without having to leave the App. The last one is “Icon Sites”, a list of major icon sites on the web, including IconPaper, IconBlock, We Love Icons and many more.

Conclusion, The sum of IconBox’s excellent, easy to use features in a very nice UI makes it a great client, it is a big leap foward from 1.0. I especially enjoy the ability to easily organize my findings, reset to the defaults, and search for new icons in-app. You should at least try the trial, and for $24.99, IconBox finally gives you a useful place to store the dozens of icons you import daily. CandyBar definitely got some serious competition with this one.

3 comments

Nice review and overview of IconBox. I’ve been a Mac user for years and have always managed my icons and changed my icons manually. I have 3 macs so I’m getting tired of manually doing things and also am looking for a way to better organize my icon collections. How does IconBox compare to CandyBar when it comes to organizing? CandyBar and IconBox both seem to serve the same functions, which does it better?

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